Saul Alinsky

Saul David Alinsky (January 30, 1909, Chicago, Illinois - June 12, 1972, Carmel, California) is generally considered the father of community organizing.

Biography and work

In the 1930s, Alinsky organized the Back of the Yards neighborhood in Chicago (made famous by Upton Sinclair's The Jungle). He went on to found the Industrial Areas Foundation while organizing the Woodlawn neighborhood, which trained leftist organizers and assisted in the founding of community organizations around the country. In Rules for Radicals (his final work, published one year before his death), he addressed the 1960s generation of leftist radicals, outlining his views on organizing for mass power.

Author of Reveille for Radicals, Alinsky encouraged unity and communication through community organizing, writing "There's another reason for working inside the system. Dostoevsky said that taking a new step is what people fear most. Any revolutionary change must be preceded by a passive, affirmative, non-challenging attitude toward change among the mass of our people. They must feel so frustrated, so defeated, so lost, so futureless in the prevailing system that they are willing to let go of the past and chance the future. This acceptance is the reformation essential to any revolution. To bring on this reformation requires that the organizer work inside the system, among not only the middle class but the 40 per cent of American families - more than seventy million people - whose income range from $5,000 to $10,000 a year [in 1971]. They cannot be dismissed by labeling them blue collar or hard hat. They will not continue to be relatively passive and slightly challenging. If we fail to communicate with them, if we don't encourage them to form alliances with us, they will move to the right. Maybe they will anyway, but let's not let it happen by default.." [1] Alinsky is often credited with laying the foundation for grassroots political organizing that dominated the 1960s [2]. Later in his life he encouraged holders of stock in public corporations to lend their votes to "proxies" who would vote at annual stockholders meetings in favor of social justice. While his grassroots style took hold in American activism, his call to stock holders to share their power with disenfranchised working poor never took hold in U.S. progressive circles.

Alinsky was a critic of a passive and ineffective mainstream liberalism. In Rules for Radicals, he argued that the most effective means are whatever will achieve the desired ends, and that an intermediate end for radicals should be democracy because of its relative ease to work within to achieve other ends of social justice.

Students of Alinsky

Many important community and labor organizers came from the "Alinsky School" and studied at the Industrial Areas Foundation Training Institute.

Alinsky in the Media

Alinksy was the subject of Hillary Rodham Clinton's senior honor's thesis at Wellesley College. Clinton commented on Alinsky's "charm," but rejected grassroots community organizing as outdated. The title of her thesis was "There is Only the Fight...". [3]

Published works

Reveille for Radicals (1946). 2nd edition 1969, Vintage Books paperback: ISBN 0-679-72112-6
John L. Lewis: An Unauthorized Biography (1949) ISBN 0-394-70882-2
Rules for Radicals: A Pragmatic Primer for Realistic Radicals (1971) Random House, ISBN 0-394-44341-1, Vintage books paperback: ISBN 0-679-72113-4
Marion K. Sanders, The Professional Radical: Conversations with Saul Alinsky (New York: Harper & Row, 1970).

Biography

Let Them Call Me Rebel: Saul Alinsky: His Life and Legacy by Sanford D. Horwitt (1989) Alfred Knopf, ISBN 0-394-57243-2; Vintage Books paperback: ISBN 0-679-73418-X

In pop culture

The 2006 album The Avalanche by Sufjan Stevens includes a song, titled "The Perpetual Self Or 'What Would Saul Alinsky Do?'".

External links

Interview with Alinsky, published in Playboy in 1972. The interview is in twelve parts. The entire text is copied onto one page, here.
Website of a documentary about Alinsky and his legacy, Democratic Promise.
Some excerpts from Reveille for Radicals.
Dissertation: Saul Alinsky and the dilemmas of race in the post-war city.